Lohara dynasty

Two lines

The Lohara family came from the Pir Panjal country west of the valley and took the Kashmiri throne on Queen Diddā's death. The dynasty is conventionally divided into a first line, to 1101, and a second thereafter, and its three centuries are dominated by factional conflict between the court, the great landholders and the ḍāmara chiefs.

Harṣa, ruling at the end of the eleventh century, is one of the more remarkable figures in Kalhaṇa's account: a cultivated and erratic king who, in a fiscal crisis, systematically stripped and melted down temple images, appointing an officer for the purpose. Kalhaṇa's description of this is the most detailed account of iconoclasm by a Hindu ruler in Indian literature, and it is a useful corrective to the assumption that temple desecration in India was always a matter of religious difference rather than of treasure.

Kalhaṇa

Kalhaṇa completed the Rājataraṅgiṇī in 1148 or 1149, under this dynasty, and his own time is the part of it he knows best and judges most harshly. The work's survival, and its continuation by later Kashmiri writers down to the Mughal period, gives Kashmir a documented dynastic history that no other Indian region possesses.

The kingdom fell into disorder in the early fourteenth century. A Mongol raid under Dulucha devastated the valley in 1320, and in the confusion that followed Shah Mir, a Muslim adventurer who had entered Kashmiri service, took power — beginning the Kashmir Sultanate and the valley's conversion to Islam.